‘Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir?’
Posted on Sep 6, 2006
Keith Olbermann has been on a roll lately, contesting the administration’s “recent Nazi kick” with a series of essays. This time the “Countdown” host went after the man himself, saying: “Mr. Bush, you are accomplishing in part what Osama Bin Laden and others seek—a fearful American populace, easily manipulated, and willing to throw away any measure of restraint, any loyalty to our own ideals and freedoms, for the comforting illusion of safety. It thus becomes necessary to remind the president that his administration’s recent Nazi ‘kick’ is an awful and a cynical thing.”
Video & Transcript
Transcript (from Crooks and Liars):
It is to our deep national shame—and ultimately it will be to the President’s deep personal regret—that he has followed his Secretary of Defense down the path of trying to tie those loyal Americans who disagree with his policies—or even question their effectiveness or execution—to the Nazis of the past, and the al Qaeda of the present.
Today, in the same subtle terms in which Mr. Bush and his colleagues muddied the clear line separating Iraq and 9/11 — without ever actually saying so—the President quoted a purported Osama Bin Laden letter that spoke of launching, “a media campaign to create a wedge between the American people and their government.”
Make no mistake here—the intent of that is to get us to confuse the psychotic scheming of an international terrorist, with that familiar bogeyman of the right, the “media.”
The President and the Vice President and others have often attacked freedom of speech, and freedom of dissent, and freedom of the press.
Now, Mr. Bush has signaled that his unparalleled and unprincipled attack on reporting has a new and venomous side angle:
The attempt to link, by the simple expediency of one word—“media”—the honest, patriotic, and indeed vital questions and questioning from American reporters, with the evil of Al Qaeda propaganda.
That linkage is more than just indefensible. It is un-American.
Mr. Bush and his colleagues have led us before to such waters.
We will not drink again.
And the President’s re-writing and sanitizing of history, so it fits the expediencies of domestic politics, is just as false, and just as scurrilous.
“In the 1920’s a failed Austrian painter published a book in which he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany and take revenge on Europe and eradicate the Jews,” President Bush said today, “the world ignored Hitler’s words, and paid a terrible price.”
Whatever the true nature of al Qaeda and other international terrorist threats, to ceaselessly compare them to the Nazi State of Germany serves only to embolden them.
More over, Mr. Bush, you are accomplishing in part what Osama Bin Laden and others seek—a fearful American populace, easily manipulated, and willing to throw away any measure of restraint, any loyalty to our own ideals and freedoms, for the comforting illusion of safety.
It thus becomes necessary to remind the President that his administration’s recent Nazi “kick” is an awful and cynical thing.
And it becomes necessary to reach back into our history, for yet another quote, from yet another time and to ask it of Mr. Bush:
“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
truthdig.com
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And, some interesting comments on the article, appended at the bottom:
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Comment #22254 by Tim Sassoon on 9/07 at 10:18 am
"The “media” will not face the truth-that the Muslims holy books, the Habib and the Koran both demand the killing of all who oppose their way of life and their doctrines.”
Wow! So all this time, ever since the Crusades, they’ve just been sharpening their knives, befriending us in the workplace, making us use their numerals and their silly “al-Jibra”, buy their oil, plant palm trees in our yards and eat dates, just waiting for the moment to strike, and slit our throats while we sleep.
My orthodox sephardic Jewish family lived among the Arabs in Baghdad for a thousand years (until 1948, of course). And my grandfather helped, as an aide to St. John Philby, to set up both the Transjordan and Saudi Arabia.
I’d prefer that instead of trying to kill them all (and let God sort ‘em out), we instead tried to wean them off salafist tendencies. Otherwise, one or another of them is bound to visit Greeley, Colorado again. My (maternal - descended from a long line of Danish marauders, who once threatened Anglo-Saxon order) grandmother always said, you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.
TS
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Comment #22219 by Hilding Lindquist on 9/07 at 5:51 am
For everyone who wants to read how a REAL conservative looks at the Bushies latest PR blitz of fear, I would suggest Paul Muslshine’s column in the New Jersey (Newark) Star-Ledger today:
“The anti-fascist oxymorons”
By Paul Mulshine
Thursday, September 07, 2006
nj.com ase/columns-0/115760886083820.xml&coll=1
Quoting from it:
It’s a little silly to talk about “victory” in Iraq when the government Bush put into power is allied with the fundamentalists who took our Iranian embassy in 1979 and truck-bombed our Kuwaiti embassy in 1983.
It’s impossible to imagine those old-time conservatives of the pre- World War II era screwing things up on this level. Taft and company had no appetite for foreign adventures.
The neocons, on the other hand, retain the internationalist outlook of the Marxism that so many of them claim to have abandoned in their youth.
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